Question

Here’s my main form and download script. I need to pass some variables to download.php. These variables are derived from html select-list. How do I pass these variables to download.php?
Here’s my main form –

<td align="left"><select name="loc" id="loc" class="select-list">
    <option value="\">Choose</option>                                       
    <option value="aa">AA</br>
    <option value="bb">BB</br>
    </select>   
</td>
<strong>Click below to download:</strong> </br></br>
<span class="button" ><a href="download.php">Download (CSV)</a></span>

Here’s my download.php code –

header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=table.csv");
header("Content-type: text/csv");
$query = "SELECT * FROM table";
echo $out;
exit;

Now I want to pass the selected value from select-list to the download.php so that I can use predicates in my MYSQL SELECT query.

Any inputs please?? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Not exactly sure if this is what you mean, but hopefully it helps.

You need to use a HTML form with server-side PHP to handle the input.
Try looking at w3schools’ tutorial. Here’s a (very basic) example:

In the form:

<form action="download.php" method="post">
<select name="loc" id="loc" class="select-list">
<option value="\">Choose</option>                                       
<option value="aa">AA</br>
<option value="bb">BB</br>
</select>   
<input type="submit" value="Download" />
</form>

In the download.php:

<?php
$val=$_POST['loc']; //this equals either aa or bb
if($val == 'aa') {
  // do whatever 
} else if($val == 'bb') {
  // do whatever
} else {
  echo "Error";
}
?>

Also, make sure you sanitize your database queries, as well as initialize the db. w3schools link